If you're interested in nineteenth century trade patterns nineteenth century patent medicine bottles are a godsend.
They're usually readily identifiable, often embossed with the manufacturers name or logo, and what's more, durable, attractive and collectable, which means that they turn up for sale on sites like ebay and gumtree, as well as more specialist bottle collecting sites.
So by treating ebay as a research resource, you can readily work out the rough distribution of the bottles - for example in both the cases of Hayman's balsam of horehound and Jacob Hulle, ebay gave me a rough spread of the bottles.
But of course it's not perfect. For a start there's no real provenance. We don't know where the bottles were found, or indeed under what circumstances. We don't know a date, even a hand waving one based on other items found with the bottles.
For example, with Jacob Hulle, we know that the company was operational for roughly ten to fifteen years, which can give us a rough date.
For Hayman's it's a bit more difficult. I've found adverts as early as 1861 and as late as 1895, which probably brackets the lifespan of the product. There's no real way of dating anything more exactly.
And of course, I'm making a big assumption, that the vendor is located close to where the bottle is found. It may of course been traded on at a collector's fair and have been found several hundred kilometres from the vendors location.
Now in the case of Australia, Wales and New Zealand the online collections of digitised newspapers are our friend, they give us clues as to where he was advertising, much as we can see that Hollway's pills were advertised extensively in the goldfields as in this example from the Ovens and Murray advertiser from 1869:
But then we turn to places such as South Africa.
I'd really like to know if the Hayman's bottles turn up exclusively in the former Cape Colony, or if they were rather more widespread. And of course one can't as there's no real provenance information ...
They're usually readily identifiable, often embossed with the manufacturers name or logo, and what's more, durable, attractive and collectable, which means that they turn up for sale on sites like ebay and gumtree, as well as more specialist bottle collecting sites.
So by treating ebay as a research resource, you can readily work out the rough distribution of the bottles - for example in both the cases of Hayman's balsam of horehound and Jacob Hulle, ebay gave me a rough spread of the bottles.
But of course it's not perfect. For a start there's no real provenance. We don't know where the bottles were found, or indeed under what circumstances. We don't know a date, even a hand waving one based on other items found with the bottles.
For example, with Jacob Hulle, we know that the company was operational for roughly ten to fifteen years, which can give us a rough date.
For Hayman's it's a bit more difficult. I've found adverts as early as 1861 and as late as 1895, which probably brackets the lifespan of the product. There's no real way of dating anything more exactly.
And of course, I'm making a big assumption, that the vendor is located close to where the bottle is found. It may of course been traded on at a collector's fair and have been found several hundred kilometres from the vendors location.
Now in the case of Australia, Wales and New Zealand the online collections of digitised newspapers are our friend, they give us clues as to where he was advertising, much as we can see that Hollway's pills were advertised extensively in the goldfields as in this example from the Ovens and Murray advertiser from 1869:
I'd really like to know if the Hayman's bottles turn up exclusively in the former Cape Colony, or if they were rather more widespread. And of course one can't as there's no real provenance information ...
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